


Fever Dreams

by HackerAxe, Vrunka



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-25
Updated: 2019-05-25
Packaged: 2020-03-13 03:47:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18932779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HackerAxe/pseuds/HackerAxe, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrunka/pseuds/Vrunka
Summary: Sunburn, heatstroke, fever dreams. Guarma is hell, hot and unbearable. It brings out the worst in Dutch, brings out the worst in Arthur himself. He only wants to help, to make things better, is that really so much to ask?





	Fever Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> For the rdr minibang!!

The heat of Guarma sticks and clings like something living. A coat, smothering, suffocating, blistering heat. It’s in between his teeth, like sour, stringy meat; cloying and ripe every time he moves his tongue wrong.

Arthur hates it.

Wishes, wishes they had never come here. Crashed here. A miracle he guesses that the four of them made it...five of them. Five of them.

Javier, bandaged, bleeding still, is lying behind the little wall of the building Dutch has them camped out in. Lying very, very still with his head in Bill’s lap and for a second, just a second Arthur thinks maybe he’s dead and they’re four and he was right but Javier’s eyes are moving beneath his lids and his chest is rising and falling with jerky little breaths.

Five of them.

Five.

Even if Arthur doesn’t like to count Micah.

Micah who is at the moment nowhere to be found. Off doing something or other or God knows what. Arthur looks away from Bill and Javier, looks out over the forest—except it’s a jungle isn’t it? Lush and tropical, all the syrupy heat simmering in the air. And there, outlined in it, is Dutch.

The island has done something terrible to him. To them all.

Dutch is bent over, shifting the tip of a stick through the sand and grit as Arthur approaches. Meaningless little lines in the dirt. Plans maybe, as good a ones as Dutch has had of late.

“Dutch,” Arthur says as he nears.

 

Dutch sits up. His hair—those perfect, sculpted curls—has gone wild in the heat. Pushed back off his face with his sweat, all of it but a few loose strands which wave about his head like a halo. The sun doesn’t help, the heat in the air so thick it glistens doesn’t help.

“Wasn’t expecting you to be up and about so quickly,” Dutch says.

They’re all still exhausted from that raid to save Javier. Drawn to their limits and beyond that even. Stretched thin.

Dutch drinks from a tin cup. He watches Arthur as he drinks. “Hotter than Hell, hm,” Dutch says.

“Something like that,” Arthur agrees.

“Just when you thought that it couldn’t get worse, bam.” Dutch makes a motion with his hand, fingers spreading outward, an explosion. “Tahiti is hot too,” Dutch says. “But not like this.”

“You ain’t even been there, Dutch.”

“I’ve read enough about it though. Met enough people who have been.”

Arthur doesn’t know how true that statement is. Doesn’t really care. Maybe the old Arthur would have, the one who couldn’t lie to Dutch, who couldn’t dream of ever lying to Dutch. He can still feel shades of that old self, flickering like a gutted candle, only just holding on to life.

“Tahiti will be good for us,” Dutch continues.

“Sure it will.”

“Can you see it, son? Can you feel it? This damn clinging heat. And over there is Miss Grimshaw and Karen and the local boys they love Karen, love her-her spirit, her energy. Love her life. And old Uncle over there under the palms, passed out, drunk on rich island rum. And Hosea—“

“Hosea’s dead, Dutch.”

It’s the first time Arthur has said it, has felt it, deep in his belly. The words move like something foreign on his tongue, his lips. Unfamiliar. Intimate.

“Hosea is dead,” he says again. “And Lenny. And maybe John. Charles.”

“Charles ain’t dead,” Dutch says. “He wouldn’t get caught.”

Wishful thinking. They ain’t none of them invincible, even if it used to feel that way. Sean and Lenny and Hosea and Jenny and too many of them to count have fallen, fallible and human.

Arthur drinks from the cup when Dutch hands it to him. The water is warm and flat, sunbaked. Stinks of iron and silt mud. Arthur drinks. Hard to care about how bad it tastes when it’s honest to God water.

“I’m sorry,” Arthur says. He’s not sure for what. For all the wrong things and for none of the things Dutch actually blames him for, he’s sure.

“Oh, Arthur,” Dutch breathes. “I know you are.”

They stand there, together in silence. A bird, one of those exotic green ones screeches in the trees to a fellow, the underbrush sways.

“You think we’re ever gonna see home again,” Arthur asks. Another olive branch, an attempt to regain the comfortable footing he and Dutch had once had. A display of his trust; his unerring respect for Dutch’s judgement.

He pointedly does not think of the old woman in the cave and her dead eyes and her slumped body.

He trusts Dutch. He has—

“I got faith, Arthur,” Dutch says.

Arthur doesn’t snort the way he wants to. Doesn’t huff all derisive and dismissive the way he should. It doesn’t matter anyway, Dutch’s eyes narrow. He scratches at his mustache with his thumb and says, “We all need faith in times like these, Arthur.”

“I know. And I—Dutch I been thinking about the past a lot.”

“Home you mean?”

“I guess you could call it that. Where we come from, what with Hosea—,” he can’t say it again. The word sticks like a shard of glass in his throat. Dutch, ever indulgent, stares at him. Head tipped to the side waiting for Arthur to make his damn point.

His damn point. Arthur’s fingers curl at his sides, skin pulling too tight, sunburn across his knuckles aching. And something else too, something in his chest, buried down like the little blue crabs down in the sand here in Hell. In Guarma.

“There was a show, back, oh I dunno, while ago. That magic man. Frederik, Fed-uhh. Something. You remember?” Arthur asks.

“I remember. Federico and his Magic’s From Across the Orient. You used to beg a nickel off me to go see it every night.”

“Wasted a lot of money.”

“You always made it back and I didn’t mind the indulgence.”

Arthur nods. Swallows. “Yeah. He used to have that act. That one where he’d wheel out those two mirrors and set ‘em up and stand in front of them. One on his right and one on his left. And of course you should see his reflection, right, it’s a mirror but no, nah. It was these...these people. On his right a little boy, on his left an old man, you remember?”

“I remember.”

“And he’d ask ‘em questions ‘bout hisself, ‘bout the future and the past.”

“It was a very good show,” Dutch says.

Arthur nods again, slower. “I never told you that I uhh I robbed him, did I, Dutch?”

“What?”

“With John. He was...whew, fifteen, sixteen. You remember how he was back then, rabid for any sorta action. I don’t even remember what I told him, what the score would be. Magician’s valuables must be worth something, fed him some sorta line like that. So we go, run the guy’s cart off the road. Get him hogtied all that...that procedure. You know, ‘ain’t gonna hurt ya, just want your money’. The old spiel.

“And he went along. Pretty as you please. Sits there without a word as we dig through the back of his wagon. All these trinkets, ‘Treasures of the East’, glass diamonds and all and there—there,” Arthur spreads his hands, remembering. The glint of the mirrors frames, gilt golden wood. Arthur sighs, he closes his eyes. “The mirrors.”

He sighs again, lets his head dip to the side. Watching Dutch watching him.

“Oh, Dutch,” he says, “they were beautiful. And...and they had my future in them, I knew it. So I get John to help me load them down. And I stand in front of them, one to my left and one to my right. And you know what I saw, Dutch.”

“I don’t, son.”

Arthur deflates, his shoulders curl inward. “I saw nothing,” he says. “It was a trick, an illusion. Mirrors had these backs, clear glass where the reflection should be. Federico’d hire and kid and some old coot to play his past and future selves at every fucking town he stopped at. Pay some coin to say some cryptic shit about the future.”

“He was a magician.”

“He was a liar. And I shot him point blank in the face for it. Left him propped by the side of his wagon with his brains spread out to the sky.”

“I’m sorry, Arthur.”

“Point is, it’s the last time I let myself get taken in by illusion, Dutch. Tahiti...it’s...it’s the same damn thing. I can’t touch it and I can’t see it and I-I-I can’t believe in it.”

“Arthur...”

“It don’t matter how badly I want to. There’s no future in the glass, it’s just...empty.”

 

It’s a gamble. Saying something so rawly doubting. In the past it wouldn’t be, wouldn’t have even come close. Back when Arthur robbed that magician, Dutch was reasonable and fair. And that’s something that changed long, long before they got to this fucking island.

Guarma didn’t make them monsters. They’ve been monsters for awhile now. It’s time that Arthur got with the program.

But Dutch doesn’t look angry the way Arthur expects. Doesn’t look pissed the way he’s gotten at the first shred of doubt for weeks now. His expression is soft almost, eyebrows flexed. Glittering little beads of sweat on his brow.

Maybe there’s a ghost here too. Maybe Arthur isn’t the only one haunted by memories of who he used to be.

Dutch’s hand reaches out.

Reaches out for him.

“Dutch I got that—,” Micah yelling. Crashing through the undergrowth behind them. Like a great animal, fucking buffoon.

Dutch snatches his hand back before his touch lands. There one minute, gone the next. Nothing up my sleeve but keep watching ladies and gentlemen because for my next trick—

Arthur flinches as Micah purposefully collides into him. A shoulder digging hard into Arthur’s back.

“Oh!” Micah grunts, too loud and sarcastic to be taken seriously. “Sorry, Artie, didn’t see you there. Hope I ain’t interrupting any important business over here but uhhh seeing as I got some of my own—See Art, I been off scoutin’ like Dutch told me too instead of lollygagging around here like a useless sack of shit.”

“Well you are inter—,” Arthur starts to say. Raising to the bait the way he always does. Bristling the moment Micah even breathes in his direction.

“It’s fine, Micah,” Dutch says, louder than Arthur. Expression hard. Back to business. Back to this new and terrible Dutch. No, not terrible, old Arthur insists from somewhere in the back of Arthur’s mind, just different, just nuanced. “What have you got for me?”

Micah grins. All teeth and edge, right over at Arthur. Staking his claim as sure as pissing all over Dutch would. Arthur feels his lip raise. Fists tightening at his side again.

“You sure you wanna talk about it in present company?” Micah asks.

Dutch sighs. He looks past Micah, meets Arthur’s gaze. “Give us a minute, would you, Arthur?”

Like he has any other choice. Maybe if they were home, nestled in Horseshoe Overlook still, before everything broke down and broke apart and became all of this, maybe he would have found it in him to fight.

But they aren’t in the past and none of them are the same as what they were.

And it’s too fucking hot to argue.

“It’s fine. Ain’t got nothin’ more to say anyway,” Arthur says. He turns, stalks back into the trees as toward camp. Distantly he hears Micah throw some kind of last word, the grating rough sound of Micah laughing. It doesn’t matter.

The past is in the past, there isn’t any little boy in the mirror.

He finds Javier and Bill much where he had left them. Bill’s head tipped forward, fast asleep. Arthur stares up into the perfect blue sky, cloudless and bright. The sun high, high above them.

He settles on the other side of the wall. Tries to think about anything except the heat. Except his hurts. He tries to think about nothing at all.

And it sort of works.

“Arthur, Arthur!”

Someone is shaking him.

Arthur snaps awake. Must have dozed off because it’s dark now. No cooler, the jungle heat, the clinging heat, hasn’t diminished with the sun going down.

It’s Dutch’s hand on his shoulder. Dutch crouched in front of him. In the darkness, he looks wild. Untamed. Feral.

“I’m up,” Arthur says. “I’m up.”

“Follow me, son.”

Follow. Arthur squeezes his eyes shut, digs his fingers into the earth beneath him. The shale and rocks bite back, nip and cut at the edges of his fingernails, the soft skin of his cuticles. Follow.

He doesn’t ask where they are going.

He stands.

He follows.

In the night, the jungle feels closer, overgrown as Dutch and Arthur move into it. Treacherous shadows, deep and shifting. The strange noises of the animals; not still even here in the dark, a constant mutter of life. Something screeches, something shuffles. A mosquito rings in Arthur’s ears.

Dutch, and Arthur following, continue forward like it is nothing.

The moon is high and bright above them, filtering down through the trees and illuminating the world in silver and purple. The heat makes everything feel unreal, disjointed. Dreamlike.

It is no dream, of course, Arthur aches too much for that. His burnt skin buzzing with his heartbeat. His lungs tight in his chest as he tries to keep breathing in that moist Guarma air.

The trees open up around them, a cut, a clearing. They aren’t that far from camp, still in the high, rocky ridges. Even the sound of the rushing river below is lost up here.

Dutch stops in the center.

Arthur stops, just outside of the treeline.

Dutch turns to look at him and Arthur crosses the space between them to stand closer. The moonlight has turned the sweat on Dutch’s brow to silver, like bullets.

“Aren’t you gonna ask me why I brought you out here, son?”

Arthur shakes his head. What good has questioning done him recently, he thinks, like pounding on a wall, beating on a locked door. It does no good.

“I trust you,” is what he says instead. It was true at one time and even as he says it, he realizes it’s still more true than he wants to pretend.

“I believe you. And I—Arthur, I want you to know I was listening. I hear you.” He reaches forward, like he had earlier. He holds it there, not touching, hovering just inches in front of Arthur’s face.

“I need you with me, Arthur,” he says. “Backing me like old times. I’ve missed you, son.”

He’s eulogizing the way he’s good at. Saying all the right words, the soothing things Arthur has wanted to hear for so, so long. How much is true, new Arthur wonders. The skeptic, the doubter. Blasphemous to who he used to be.

Arthur steps forward despite the doubt, bridges the gap. Pushes his face into Dutch’s waiting hand. That soft, gentle grip. 

The heat sears where their naked skin touches. Raw and burnt and horribly red. Arthur hisses when Dutch’s fingers stroke down his cheek. Desire and discomfort rolling and warring within him.

“Have you missed me too,” Dutch asks. His fingers slide along Arthur’s jaw, down his throat. Pressing against his pulse, his trembling, fluttering Adam’s apple. This close Arthur can smell him, thick sweat, something earthen and dark.

Arthur swallows down the sudden bolt of desire. That primal, meaty feeling.

It’s been awhile since he faced it head on like this. The flickering thing he’s always harbored; one step further than the dedication of a son or a brother. He isn’t, and hasn’t ever been, ashamed of it exactly. He thought for a while, especially recently, that maybe Dutch has been ashamed. The way that Dutch has so easily swayed over to Micah’s side in every argument, in every scrap. In every petty little decision.

But Dutch is holding his face, here and now, in fucking Guarma’s uncomfortable heat. If this is something he can do, that he can offer to help, then Arthur will do it, give it. Years ago it would not have even been a question. It’s barely one now.

“Are you sure, Dutch?” Arthur asks.

“Only if you are.”

Oh, what a stupid question. On the rare occasion that Dutch has allowed him this before, Arthur has always been sure. Now is no different. He sops up every errant splash of Dutch’s attention. That fluttering, fading ghost in him won’t have it any other way.

“Then how do you want me, Dutch?”

Over the years, there’s been a lot of answers to that question. On his back, on his front, on his knees. Arthur thinks, unbidden, of the mirrors, himself as a younger man giving himself body and soul to Dutch.

Dutch, going to his knees in front of Arthur here and now, quashes and shatters that connection instantly.

“What are you doin’?”

Another dumb question. Dutch’s quick, steady fingers—big and blunt but so deft and so graceful—press against the front of Arthur’s tattered trousers. There is only one thing he could be doing, down on his knees like that, touching and teasing the way he is.

Never done it this way before. All the years they spent doing things like this, on and off and Dutch has never used his mouth. Never debased himself in this way; always composed and letting Arthur be the one to offer everything.

His breath, huffing against Arthur’s hip, is more uncomfortable heat. Sticky sweat prickling Arthur’s skin. Everything moist. It probably makes it easier, actually. The first glide of Dutch’s hands against him isn’t rough or dry like it usually is.

It flickers something to life in Arthur that he had almost forgotten. A tightening in gut, in his balls, welling up from the bottoms of his sunburnt feet and through his knees and up his spine. His cock twitches and Dutch glances up through his lashes and into Arthur’s face. He’s grinning.

That wild look from earlier returning. Stray hairs, stubble, and something crazy glimmering in Dutch’s eyes. Silver moonlight glinting off the saliva on his tongue when he lowers it against the crown of Arthur’s cock.

Unreal. Surreal.

Arthur never could have—would have—dreamt this in a million years. That past him folded up inside of himself could never have imagined this moment, Dutch’s mouth on him. Dutch sullying himself, sloppy too quick, spit dribbling from the corners of his mouth, catching in his mustache.

The visual is almost more than Arthur can take, almost does more than the wet heat of Dutch’s mouth is doing.

Dutch is giving and for the first time ever, Arthur is allowed to take and take.

And take he does.

He sinks his hand into Dutch’s hair. It’s moist, sweat against his palm, slick. It doesn’t smell like pomade like it used to in the old days; it smells like salt, like the sea, smells thick and rich, musky.

Arthur swallows. Presses on Dutch’s head, testing the limits. What he can get away with.

A lot it seems. Dutch hums something that could only be encouragement and pushes up into Arthur’s touch. His lips tremble on Arthur’s cock. Errant curls caught around Arthur’s grasping fingers getting tugged on too roughly, probably; something Arthur would be more aware of if he weren’t so out of depth in this whole situation.

The past few months another ghost at his back. Unable to be completely forgotten, completely erased. But this could be something, a new start born from this Hell; Arthur groans, suddenly, desperately hungry for that.

A clean slate.

A new beginning.

He tugs harder on Dutch’s hair until Dutch relents, looks up at him. His cheeks are red, could be the sunburn or the exertion, could be a blush, impossible to tell. His eyes shimmer in the moonlight.

“Can’t tell me you’re close already, son.”

Arthur is but that isn’t the point. It’s been too long and everything here feels so much more intense than it should. He clears his throat, voice catching, clicking foreign and rough when he says, “Nah, Dutch, just want you to—that is it’s always better together.”

Dutch’s eyes gleam, his teeth catch the moonlight, catch on his lips. The hands still anchored on Arthur’s tattered and torn pants clench and with very little warning he pulls Arthur down to his knees. On the same level now. Dirt and dust and fallen palm leaves crunching beneath their weight.

Dutch kisses him. Sweaty still, sticky, tasting too thickly of Arthur’s own release, his own musk. Days they’ve spent here, unwashed. Arthur manages not to flinch away. Dutch’s mustache tickles against his lips and Arthur thinks back on how they never really kissed much before.

Something too intimate in that act maybe.

Something to be indulged in now because this is—

“New,” Arthur mumbles into Dutch’s mouth. “From this moment I want to only-only move forward, Dutch. With you.”

“We can do that, son.” His fingers are fumbling, knuckles bumping against Arthur’s cock as he works his own battered trousers down. Pressing the two of them together.

He burns like a brand, hot and hard and thick against Arthur’s hip.

“The future—,” Arthur starts to say.

“We’ll face it together.”

Not Tahiti Arthur wants to say. A new plan. A new start. They have money, what should be a lot of money, if Arthur’s been counting the funds right. A fresh start is theirs for the taking.

Just not Tahiti.

Nowhere damn near like this.

Hellish and thick.

The air is muggy between them. Arthur can feel his lungs working too hard, too tightly, dragging the air in and in and in like it is a struggle. Forcing it out. Something loose like liquid at the bottom of his throat.

He ignores it.

Focuses instead on the way Dutch’s hands feel around both of their cocks. The slip sliding feel of more than just precome. But sweat and spit too. Things that should seem nasty, but that Arthur can’t quite feel that way about.

He can’t scrape together enough sense to feel any sort of way about anything really. Lightheaded from the heat, from the lack of food and sleep and water and everything. Dizzy from this sudden onslaught of emotions that he wasn’t fully prepared to open himself up to. Arousal hitting him so low in the gut; it has him leaning too heavily on Dutch. Hand holding onto Dutch’s wrist, just hanging there, gripping with everything he’s got.

“You close?” Dutch asks. He sounds so fond, deep voice curling warm and familiar in Arthur’s ear.

“A little.”

“Feels good.” A question, a statement, doesn’t matter.

Arthur nods, weakly, into Dutch’s throat. “I’ve missed it, Dutch. You, Dutch.”

“Could have had me, all you had to do was ask.”

But that isn’t true. Arthur, here and now, stuck on Gurama with his dead friends and dead mentors and dead family he knows it isn’t true. That no amount of asking would have been enough.

The lie strikes something, twinges deep, deep in Arthur’s heart. Little crabs in the sand again with their snipping claws. Warning signs. The whites in horses eyes. A mangy dog bearing its teeth.

Arthur thinks of all of these things in sequence, nonsensical.

Dutch is leaning back slightly, hand a blur below their waists and Arthur loses the end of the thread he’d been holding. The tensing in his gut that should be only pleasure, had been only pleasure, is soured now, and winding tighter.

“Oh, Arthur,” Dutch breathes. His voice is soft and melodic in the night. None of that tenseness he sometimes gets when he’s too close to his own pleasure. Keyed up and dragged out. He sounds gentle almost. Tender.

He sighs again. Leans forward.

“I love you, Arthur,” he says.

It’s the first time he has ever said it with words.

It’s the first time he’s ever said it.

And it’s the same of the mirrors, Arthur knows that for sure. He tilts his head back and looks up at Dutch and he knows it. This—this is an illusion. Bittersweet. Imaginary. This is the man in the mirror for the future.

And he isn’t real.

The mirror is empty and it always was.

Just glass and smoke. Mumbo-jumbo and sleight of hand.

Arthur swallows. His fingers twitch, nails catching on Dutch’s shoulder, tearing at the sweat-stained fabric.

“Dutch,” he grunts. And maybe Dutch just misunderstands it, or misreads it, or mishears it, or maybe he’s too fucking close to his own end to parse the distress in Arthur’s tone.

Or maybe he just flat out doesn’t care and never has.

This is a means to an end. Keeping Arthur in line and satisfied and with the program. It’s Tahiti by a different name and a different taste, but a grandiose lie all the same.

Arthur takes another breath and his body, worthless, weak-willed thing, trembles release across Dutch’s grasping fingers. It leaves him gasping, open-mouthed. A fish washed up from a poisoned river, drowning in the air, is how he feels. Something in his chest moving like sludge, mired again.

The new beginning he had dreamed of sinking back down into the black muck of it.

The empty mirrors, shattered glass carries no seven years of bad luck for breaking it. Federico had watched him do it, watched silent as Arthur banged his gun against the glass, once, twice, efficient. He hadn’t said a damn word. Didn’t even say anything when Arthur pointed the gun at his temple. Just stared and stared and said nothing at all.

Arthur swallows and stares up at the sky and tries to stop the associations. The long, long kept memories, harbored behind his ribs.

Dutch is pulling his own shirt off, wiping Arthur and himself down with it. The material is rough, Arthur flinches when it drags over his still sensitive flesh. He takes his own shirt off, skin prickling with his burns, with his sweat, uncomfortable now that the passion has fled. Back to the suffocating, horrible humidity.

He doesn’t feel weightless or boneless as he usually does after release. The ejaculate Dutch wipes off of him is thin, watery. Duty, Arthur thinks, borne from obligation. His past self offers no argument, that lingering ghost of it has been freed from him with the shattering of Arthur’s perceptions.

Finally, finally put to rest. He no longer feels it rattling along with his heart.

Arthur sighs, he lays back. The palm leaves feel smooth beneath his spine, cooling where they touch his fevered feeling skin. He curls his hands into the foliage. He breathes.

Dutch moves around him. He feels and hears Dutch’s fiddling more than sees it. Dutch’s deep sigh as he settles on the ground behind Arthur’s head. A hand, Dutch’s gentle, cruel, amazing hand touches Arthur’s temple, pushes just enough that their heads touch.

Old Arthur would have taken so much from the little gesture. Arthur can’t help but wonder what went so wrong and how they got here, the bond they used to share dried up to almost nothing. He closes his eyes.

Mirrors, he thinks. Reflections. Fevers. Illusions. The two of them failing over and over, so stupid and clumsy and human. Gaurma heat, Gaurma hell. Things had been bad before but this has dragged out the worst out of them. Has broken down the one thing Arthur had always felt so sure of.

Dutch maybe does love him, in some sort of way, but it’s been a long time since Arthur really loved Dutch.

He wonders if being on this island was the only way for him to see that.

He wonders if it really matters at all. If this is how Hosea felt as he knelt in the street. The sudden yawning at the pit of his stomach that there is no going back. That there is nothing here to be salvaged or saved.

The gang is done. The family is broken. The mirror cannot be pieced back together. And Arthur cannot fit himself into the shattered reflection, regardless of how long he had spent there in the past.

“We should get back,” Dutch says. Fingers moving in Arthur’s hair. So, so unaware of Arthur’s innermost thoughts.

“Home?”

“To the others.”

“And then home?”

“And then home,” Dutch agrees. “You with me, Arthur?”

Nothing stirs in Arthur’s breast at the question. None of that lingering guilt, that heavy nostalgia. Hardly even remorse as he licks his lips and says, “To the end, Dutch.”

It’s a lie.

Easiest he’s ever told. A mirror for Dutch, an empty promise, a reflection of nothing at all. Arthur sits up, his skin and muscles ache but he stretches his arms and revels just a little in the stings and complaints. The heat gathers close around him like a shroud and he accepts it.

His whole life has fallen to pieces before his eyes, cheap glass sliding loose from the frame, and what can he do but accept it. The mirrors were empty and they always were and now more than ever he has to find the solution on his own. Protect what matters most.

Get home and protect them.

Dutch’s hand lowers in front of his face, offering help up. Arthur takes it, grasps Dutch’s elbow and pulls himself upright. The important things. What matters most, Abigail and John and Little Jack and Tilly. Karen. Miss Grimshaw.

They cannot afford for him to wallow in his loss.

And so he won’t.

“Let’s go, Dutch,” he says.

“Alright, son,” Dutch says. “I’m glad to have you back.”

Arthur feels himself smile, the corners of his lips curling, genuine, like he would have in the old days. The divide between the two of them has become a canyon, an ocean, the uncrossable distance from Blackwater to Tahiti. If Dutch chooses to believe in it, so be it.

“Until the end, Dutch,” Arthur says again.

Until the very, very end.


End file.
